💠By fixating on Erdogan’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his war in Ukraine, we have neglected Turkey’s involvement in another tragedy that epitomises its uncomfortable fit within NATO: Ankara’s drone sales to Ethiopia.
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💠By fixating on Erdogan’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his war in Ukraine, we have neglected Turkey’s involvement in another tragedy that epitomises its uncomfortable fit within NATO: Ankara’s drone sales to Ethiopia.
The Telegraph has labelled the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region as the ‘Great War of Africa’ and the ‘deadliest war in the world’. It is on track to be the bloodiest and most costly conflict of the new millennium, yet it has failed to grab major headlines.
Clashes in late August between the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) and the militant Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia’s northern regions reignited a two-year civil war that has seen horrific crimes committed by both sides.
At least half a million Ethiopians have been killed and millions more displaced. These figures, which already dwarf the human cost in Ukraine, don’t include the cost of the war’s agricultural devastation during a severe drought, which the World Bank estimates will plunge 70 million East Africans into famine by next July.
Disturbingly, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed—a former Nobel Peace Prize winner—has morphed from Africa’s democratic darling into a repressive and autocratic warmonger.
Worse still, Abiy has equipped his forces with fleets of armed drones from international suppliers, including the United Arab Emirates, China and Iran. Since last November, however, when it finalised a security pact with Erdogan, the ENDF has been turbocharging its drone fleet with Turkish Bayraktar TB2s—a platform so cheap, reliable and popular it has been called ‘the Toyota Corolla of drones’.
The use of these drones has fundamentally changed the strategic calculus underpinning both sides’ behaviour, threatening to push any potential peace deal out of reach. The damage they have wrought throughout Tigray prompted UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to issue a statement last week describing the toll on civilians as ‘utterly staggering’.
